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It’d be nice to think that any infrastructure would work seamlessly with an open source platform but what is nice and what happens in the real world are two different things. This is especially so in the cloud space where platforms are rapidly iterating and infrastructure vendors sometimes struggle to keep up.

This tension is the reason that OpenStack contributor Mirantis is today announcing Stackalytics.com, a dashboard to give customers clarity about which infrastructure solutions are interoperable with OpenStack. Stackalytics is based on the DriverLog open source initiative that is maintained by the OpenStack community. The data is kept up to data via an open peer review process.

The announcement is timed to occur during the OpenStack summit being held this week in Atlanta. At the summit the OpenStack foundation is also announcing a new marketplace. Any solutions that are listed in the marketplace need to support the native OpenStack API set, hence this Stackalytics announcement is another part of that puzzle – it gives customers some more clarity beyond simply API compatibility. In talking up the importance of Stackalytics, Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski said that:

Traditional open source communities tend to delegate vendor compatibility matters to commercial vendors and downstream distributions… we believe that OpenStack is about unifying heterogeneous infrastructure innovations at the core, and exposing them via an open cloud fabric at the edge. To that effect, open process and transparency in addressing vendor compatibility is key to the success of the OpenStack community. Dashboards at stackalytics.com and openstack.org based on DriverLog are the first step in addressing this

Alongside compatibility information, the Stackalytics site provides the following resources:

Access to instructions on how to configure any vendor’s product with OpenStack

Information on whether a vendor’s driver is embedded in the upstream codebase of an OpenStack release

Information on whether a vendor has deployed an automated test infrastructure that provides feedback on the vendor’s driver passing or failing functional and integration tests

Quick shortcuts for OpenStack deployers to contact maintainers of vendor drivers in case they run into issues.

Transparency is indeed the best thing for an open source initiative – especially so for a project like OpenStack that has, in the past, been accused of demonstrating a lack of this transparency. Stackalytics isn’t a massive deal, but it’s another part in the maturing of the OpenStack initiative – and for that reason it’s another important step in the project.

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